Today, we would like to remind you of the Book Institute’s work to promote the presence of Polish literature and culture, as well as works important to Ukrainians themselves, in Ukraine. The Book Institute has been supporting translations into Ukrainian consistently since the inception of the ©Poland Translation Programme, i.e. since 1998. To date, the Institute has helped to publish more than 220 translations. In no other country has the Book Institute’s support for publishing been so great.
The first translations into Ukrainian with the support of the ©Poland Translation Programme were published even before the establishment of the Book Institute. In 1999, the Kameniar publishing house published a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s poems (translated by S. O. Szewczenko), and two years late, the Osnovy Publishing House released an anthology of Polish poetry translated by Dmytr Pawłyczko.
Besides the classics – to mention Sienkiewicz, Wyspianski, Zapolska, Prus – works by outstanding Polish contemporary authors were published in Ukrainian (from Miłosz, through Schulz, Herling-Grudziński, Gombrowicz, Mrożek, Różewicz, Szymborska, Herbert, and Olga Tokarczuk), and, above all, books serving to build good neighbourly relations and bringing closer the common history, such as Emigracja ukraińska (“Ukrainian Emigration”) by Jerzy Giedroyc (translated by Ola Hnatiuk, Krytyka, 2006), Franciszek Jaworski’s Lwów stary i wczorajszy (“Lviv of the Past and of Yesterday”, translated by Ludmila Bublik, Centre for Europe, 2011), Nie jesteśmy ukrainofilami. Polska myśl polityczna wobec Ukraińców i Ukrainy (”We are not Ukrainophiles. Polish Political Thought Towards Ukrainians and Ukraine”) by Paweł Kowal, Jan Ołdakowski, and Monika Zuchniak (translated by Serhiy Hirik, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2011), Essays on the History of Poland and Ukraine in the XVI-XVII Centuries by Henryk Litwin (translated by Lesia Lysenko, Duch i Litera, 2014), and Historia Rzeczypospolitej Wielu Narodów 1505-1795 (“History of the Polish Commonwealth of Many Nations 1505-1795“) by Andrzej Sulima Kamiński (translated by J. Strich, Our Time, 2010).
For years, the Book Institute has been cooperating with the most important independent Ukrainian publishing houses, such as Folio, Urbino, Astrolabium, Litopys and V. Books – XXI.
